Connecting Motor-Sport with Fans, Individuals and Communities

How those working in motor-sport must do their bit to relate to the world at large

If motor-sport is to grow and prosper in these challenging and changing times, all of us involved in both the performance engineering sector and in the sport itself need to do much more to safeguard our futures by making motor-sport relevant to the wider public and by connecting with individual citizens and local communities.

Motor-sport has been notoriously inward looking and secretive as a commercial sector since time immemorial; there are also relatively few motor-sport proprietors and entrepreneurs who are genuinely keen to understand and assimilate good management practice from elsewhere.  Those who are tend to be conspicuously more successful.  In my own field of recruitment and personnel management, there are precious few HR people engaged in Formula One, or elsewhere in motor-sport even, who are professionally qualified.  The reverse of course would emphatically be true in aerospace, defence, IT, pharmaceuticals or leading-edge retail. 

It has come to a pretty pass when several F1 Teams will now not even look at Graduates or Apprentices who emerge from courses with the word “Motorsport” in their title.

Breadth and flexibility of approach are now key.  In my race-driver management activities, I have tried to ban the use of that most misleading of concepts, “sponsorship.”  I seek to get driver clients to look to the establishment of effective “strategic partnerships” which genuinely connect with the communities in which they live.

How may that happen?  Well, motor-sport is historically viewed by Regional Development Agencies (except those connected with “Motorsport Valley” perhaps), Government Offices, Local Authorities and, often, Business Links and Chambers of Commerce as (perm any combination) elitist, frighteningly wasteful and expensive, aloof, environmentally destructive, smelly, noisy, egocentric and dangerous.  It encourages bad behaviour on housing estates, unnecessary car worship and plain anti-social behaviour.  The oft-publicised antics of the powers-that-be don’t help much either.

Why not then systematically seek to dispel such thoughts?  Lewis Hamilton has certainly helped in recent years and we should all be concentrating upon bringing more and more women into motor-sport and trying to widen and deepen participation in the sport – by ethnic minorities, by women, by disabled people, by older people.

The trick is to identify local and regional issues where motor-sport can actually help to provide SOLUTIONS.

In England’s South West, where I am based, we have a huge problem in motivating young people - we need effective role models and there is particular underachievement by young males.  Luckily, Jenson Button is an excellent role model for us.  The skills that took him to the motor-sport pinnacle are also the skills extant in the local Performance Engineering, Aerospace and Defence industries that one finds in the area.  All these industries need people who can innovate and move frontiers; each sector can help and feed off the other.  Each can provide exciting careers and can keep individuals genuinely motivated.

Race-drivers are also well placed to be ambassadors for the encouragement of both tourism and inward investment.

And so, let us assume that Government bodies and Local Authorities actually want to see well motivated citizens, with real aspiration, and also want to identify and encourage new inward investors, sources of investment, more visitors and tourists, a properly balanced local or regional economy, personalities to profile in the local media, the generating of skills needed by Local Employers and compatible with existing leading-edge companies, sustaining perhaps a culture of innovation, of success, of sustained development.  There’s actually only one true catalyst for the achievement of all these and that is motor-sport.  And used carefully and professionally and sensitively, it can actually work.

Motor-sport is now inextricably involved in securing solutions to save our planet too.  We just need to tell people, be less self-effacing about it and reach out to each of the communities of which we are a part and say “hey, we indulge in responsible motor-sport, an activity and an industry which is genuinely inclusive, welcoming of new partners, solutions orientated and interested in sustaining confident communities whilst innovating in the interests of our environment.”

Published: “Racecar Engineering” Volume 20 Number 4 - April 2010